"Eliminating water shortages depends on a global attempt to raise water productivity similar to the effort launched a half-century ago to raise land productivity, an initiative that has nearly tripled the world grain yield per hectare." –Lester R. Brown, World Facing Huge New Challenge on Food Front inPlan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

Press Room

Media Advisories

Au Revoir & Thank You!

WASHINGTON, DC – All good things must come to an end, and we at the Earth Policy Institute (EPI) find ourselves sadly at the end of a road filled with many successes. With our president and founder, Lester Brown, stepping down at the age of 81, we are closing our doors on June 30, 2015. Our awesome staffers are finding new posts to continue their work, and we are certain that they will be able to further the issues EPI has pursued.

We are grateful for fourteen amazing years and for all that has been accomplished, often with your help.

Our eleven books, including Lester’s autobiography, Breaking New Ground, and the most recent book, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy, tell our story, as do the hundreds of Plan B Updates, Eco-Economy Indicators, Data Highlights, Fact Sheets, and Book Bytes. Our work was even the feature of a 2011 PBS documentary, Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization produced by Marilyn and Hal Weiner of Screenscope.

We are delighted to say that our website and all of its information, data, and research publications will remain available to you. The School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University has agreed to keep our site available as a legacy website. They will also be honoring their alumnus, Lester Brown, by establishing a Lester R. Brown Reading Room in the fall of 2015. It is heartening to know that so much of what Lester accomplished over his long career will be readily accessible—an inspiration to future leaders.

We give our heartfelt thanks to our Board of Directors—Judy Gradwohl, Raisa Scriabine, Bill Mansfield, Scott McVay, Hamid Taravati, and Jeremy Waletzky—most of whom have been with us from our inception in 2001. They have been a source of inspiration, encouragement, and wise counsel.

We also give thanks to Roger and Vicki Sant for EPI’s startup grant, to the financial support we have received from the Gellert, Goldman, Hewlett, Jones, Lannan, McBride Family, Shenandoah, Turner, Wallace Genetic, Weeden, and Winslow foundations, the Educational Foundation of America, and the UN Population Fund. We are also indebted to the generosity of individual donors including, importantly, Fred Stanback, Col. Henry Ingwersen, Harriett Crosby, Junko Edahiro, John McBride, and Laney Thornton.

There is an army of people around the world who have contributed in a number of ways to our work. First and foremost are those who have published our books. This includes W. W. Norton & Company in the United States that has published every book written by Lester Brown over the past forty years, and our other stalwart translators and publishers. These include Lin Zixin in China, Hamid Taravati and Farzaneh Bahar in Iran, Gianfranco Bologna and the team at Edizioni Ambiente in Italy, Soki Oda in Japan, Editura Tehnica in Romania, Lars and Doris Almström in Sweden, Doyosae Books founded by Yul Choi in South Korea, TEMA in Turkey, Earthscan in the U.K., David Biro in Hungary, Cyril Ivanov of Paper Tiger in Bulgaria, Pierre-Yves Longaretti and Philippe Vieille in France, Gilberto Rincon of the Centre of Studies for Sustainable Development in Colombia for the Spanish edition, Maurits Groen of MGMC in The Netherlands, and Makis Fountoulis of Editio Chronico in Greece.

We’d also like to say thank you to all of you who have sent us emails and letters thanking us for our work. Your words have touched us deeply.